Dunbar’s Law and Your Stuff

I was reading through Everett Bogue's old e-book The Art of Being Minimalist and stumbled into an interesting idea.

Dunbar's Law says that the maximum number of people you can genuinely, sincerely relate to in the real world is about 150 people. You can't really have 1,000 "friends" on Facebook unless you use the post-post-modern definition of the word "friend," which of course isn't a friend at all.

But what if you applied this concept to your stuff? To the amount of things you owned?

Thinking back to how we must have lived millennia ago, almost no one had the resources to own hundreds of books, dozens of pieces of furniture, hundreds of shirts, shoes, even (as much as I'd rather not admit it) pairs of underwear.

And as Bogue says, "Once you get past 150 things, you start to lose your glasses. You don't remember what is in that box anymore, unless it's labeled and you look at it. ...Imagine how many objects a hunter/gatherer in the bush has to deal with? A lot less. This leaves valuable brain power for getting the work done."